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Are We At The End Of The Beginning Of DOOH?

I spent most of Monday at the DS Investors Conference and most of Wednesday at the DPAA 2011 Digital Media Summit.

What was notable at both events was that almost every speaker talked about leveraging the connection between DOOH screens and their mobile audience, multi-channel strategies and leveraging mobile and social media technologies.

What was different this week was that this buzz was not limited to the “interactive tent” - it was center stage. What used to be a lonely platform for way-too-early entrepreneurs and evangelists like me, is now well and truly an accepted part of our agenda.

I’m not convinced that every speaker at the conferences was “eating their own dog food” but I can’t gripe - obviously we still have some way to go, but at least the entire industry is talking about it.

There are various stages in the maturation of a digital market, and in my opinion, we’ve reached the end of the beginning.

Borrowed from an earlier Gartner paper, what I touched on in The DOOH Slope of Enlightenment suggests that digital markets move through various stages staring with a “Peak of Inflated Expectations” where the market experiences a fool’s gold rush and invariably early adopters pay the price for being early. The market then moves through a downward trend where it adjusts to a “Trough of Disillusionment” and finally it reaches a point where companies actually release products that exceed users’ expectations. At that point, the market can start to move up the “Slope of Enlightenment.”

As the web evolved from digital brochureware, so too are DOOH screens finally being forced to be more than slideware. Some are and many more will be more connected, more engaging and, as a result, more valuable.

Judging not only from the majority of speakers’ inclusion of all things mobile and social, but also the stream of Tweets from users at both events and even the inclusion of a Twitter screen at the DPAA event - I would say we are at the end of the beginning of DOOH. We are standing at the beginning of the Slope of Enlightenment.

Do you agree?

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Wiffiti At Ginza Graphic Gallery, Japan

The Ginza Graphic Gallery’s 25th anniversary commemorative exhibition brought together 100 beautiful books by 100 (probably equally beautiful) designers. More details here.

Also on display was the gallery’s first e-book and a Wiffiti screen which was tagged to show filtered tweets about the exhibition and Foursquare check-ins.

The event was planned and organized by DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion and the local technology providers of the Wiffiiti screen were Fujifilm Imagetec.

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Let Me Interrupt You.

The DOOH Audience Is mobile so it’s really important that as DOOH practitioners, we understand our audience’s mobile behavior before we get seduced into investing/designing in sexy mobile technologies. But with our ADD generation, often limited to 140 characters, the mobile UX is frequently an afterthought.

Apple, and before them Nokia, really understand (or understood in the case of Nokia) what mobility meant BEFORE designing mobile solutions.

When we humans are mobile, our experience is often focused on an activity that, if interrupted, stops our mobility in its tracks. We could be walking, driving, playing, shopping etc and if interrupted, that interruption better be for a good reason.

A mobile app (ignoring how it’s discovered) should ideally complement a dominant mobile activity. But if it has to interrupt mobile behavior, it has to offer a compelling enough reason for the user to break away from that activity.

As a designer of a mobile experience, if you don’t think about how, when and why an interrupt-driven message will and can be received, you will almost certainly fail.

Is your user standing in line, pushing a shopping cart, carrying a bag, driving, drinking, watching a concert? How much dwell time do they have to notice, act, react, interact? In many cases, the answer is 15-60 SECONDS (see this post on how UX maps to different types of locations and engagement models).

Now work out if your shiny new smartphone app, NFC app, QR code or text messaging CTA are worthy of interrupting your audience. Now sanity-check that your execution includes giving the user enough time AND benefit (e.g. “The 3Fs” Fun, Fame and Fortune, also covered in the above linked post) to engage.

I hope this interruption to your daily reading was worth while. If it was, please Tweet about it. It is wasn’t, I guess I’ve proven a point - because if it’s not even worth your while to click on a simple Twitter icon, how sobering is it to think about engaging your users?

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South Park Buzz + iPhone Buzz @Times Square. A Great Example Of Real Time Place-Based Social Media!

Well, the start of Q4’11 has been really hectic.

Not only were we honored to be participating at the Robin Hood event with Black Eyed Peas in Central Park, but we were also chosen to be the interactive social platform behind a launch campaign for South Park’s new series which kicked off yesterday in New York’s Times Square.

Times Square visitors could create a South Park avatar of themselves at an interactive kiosk, and then see their avatar displayed live alongside real time tweets (hashtagged SOUTHPARK) on the famous MTV/Viacom screen in Times Square.

And of course, unless you were asleep, yesterday also marked the announcement of the much anticipated iPhone5 ahem iPhone4s.

Place-based social media is ALL ABOUT CAPTURING THE MOMENT AND LETTING THE AUDIENCE ENGAGE, so the last photo in the set here just about sums it up. A tweet proclaims “The iPhone4s killed Kenny”.

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60,000 New Yorkers, 4 Black Eyed Peas and 8 Huge LocaModa Screens

Last Friday night, in New York City, 60,000 people came The Great Lawn in Central Park to enjoy a concert by the Black Eyed Peas. The event was organized by the Robin Hood Foundation to fund poverty-fighting programs in New York City.

They raised over $4,000,000.

As part of the evening’s connected strategy, 7 huge LocaModa screens displayed live Twitter feeds and photo streams.

For the DOOH geeks amongst us, the screen specs were:

1 x Upstage 26’7″ tall X 55’1″ wide (2.0 aspect ratio)
1 x Mid-stage center: 14’9″ tall X 26’5″ wide (1.77 aspect ratio)
2 x Mid-stage side screens: 11’6″ tall X 9’10″ wide (.8 aspect ratio, portrait)
4 x Crowd screens: 11’4″ tall X 20’8″‘ wide (1.83 aspect ratio)

As the daylight faded (the Peas came on stage at 7.30) the screens were a beacon for engagement. Over 2,000 tweets were sent during the event (which was pretty impressive as we couldn’t even get wireless signal with so many people there!).

It’s not too late to donate here:

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